The Most Intimate Thing You Can Do With Your Smartphone

For all the junk food apps they’ve introduced to our daily diets, it’s hard to argue with the fact that smartphones give us an incredible array of tools for staying in touch with our loved ones. High-quality video chat has made it possible to catch up face-to-face no matter where you are in the world and apps like Snapchat have given us new forums for expressing intimate, vulnerable, and spontaneous moments. Still, though, whether you’re reading a text message or watching a friend’s smiling face, both are trapped behind a slab of glass. Touch Room, a weird little iPhone app, facilitates a different type of interaction altogether. It lets you reach through that glass window and actually touch someone.

You could argue that the app doesn’t do anything at all. You open it, establish a “touch room,” and send a link to a friend. There’s nothing inside the room until you put your finger on the screen–when you do, your fingertip shows up as a red dot. When your friend puts a finger on their screen, their fingertip shows up as a red dot too; as they move it, the virtual fingertip darts around your screen in real time. Then, when your two fingertips overlap, both phones vibrate. That’s it. The app does nothing besides letting you and a loved one execute a remote, synchronous smartphone version of an E.T.-style finger-to-finger kiss.

Chris Allick and Pablo Rochat, the developers behind Touch Room, are aware that compared to today’s fantastically sophisticated apps, theirs “seems quite useless.” They admit that they were content to build “the absolute simplest application that would be allowed into the App Store to deliver this experience to people.” But they were right about their calculation: Just a taste of that experience is enough. It’s a glimpse into an entirely new type of virtual interaction that far beyond texting to become something much more immediate and intimate and visceral.

It’s a glimpse into an entirely new type of virtual interaction.

“Whenever two people experience the vibration and sense of connection,” Allick says, “they all have the same reaction: ‘Wow.'” He’s right–even after years of rapid-fire texting, routine FaceTime calls, and complex mobile games that let you interact with other players in real time, the experience of using Touch Room is different. It is, if only momentarily, a little bit thrilling. Stripped of anything but the interaction itself, this undeniable symmetry emerges: You know when your friend has her finger on the screen and you know when she takes it off. You know where she’s touching her screen. And when you’re both touching your phones in exactly the same place, you know for that moment, you’re both feeling the exact same physical sensation of your devices buzzing in hand. The spartan interface foregrounds that immediacy–something Allick says Rochat was very much trying to preserve. “He wants the most powerful design element to be the other person you are interacting with,” Allick says, which is actually a pretty profound idea.

Allick and Rochat work for the ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners and built the app as part of the company’s BETA Group–a division that focus on creative technology and design. Allick had long been interested in kinetics and haptic feedback, but the spark for Touch Room came recently, when one of the firm’s executives mentioned how much he’d like to be able to touch his kid while on vacation. “There is something so simple an elegant about the desire to touch from afar,” Alick says. “Why not? Well, it’s a rather complicated technical problem.”

Still, recent advances in real-time networking technologies are making it possible to achieve, and the duo sees Touch Room as a proof of concept–a glimpse into a future of real-time haptic feedback. “For me and Pablo, Touch Room is supposed to be a thought-provoking experience,” Allick says. “Are designers and technologists creating products and experiences that actually help us and make us feel more connected?” When you use Facebook, for example, are you building relationships or just hoping to rack up some “likes”? In Allick’s view, with many of today’s social apps, “we’ve become addicted to the attention we receive, not the connection.” With Touch Room, the connection is undeniable, and it’s a little bit exhilarating.